Announcing the New SEOmoz Toolbar - Plus 5 New&nbspFeatures

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

First, let me make a quick introduction. Normally, I spend my time focused on new products at SEOmoz, working with a great team of people that design and build our new tools and features. Today I am excited to use my first blog post to announce our new SEO toolbar for Firefox, and tell you about some of the powerful features we have added.

As a quick reminder, all of these new features are free, and will be available to anyone who downloads the Firefox SEO Toolbar! However, we still reserve advanced link data for PRO members.

So, on to the features. To add a little color to my descriptions, I've also asked some SEO experts you may recognize to preview the toolbar and talk about how they use the new features.

1. New SERP Overlay

This new Search Engine Results Page overlay was designed to offer the most relevant link data without getting in the way. You can now use our toolbar to see which search results are getting the most links, and click Explore to run a full analysis in Open Site Explorer. To turn on this overlay, click the settings button on the toolbar, and select SERP Overlay.

"I get the best 'feel' for abstract metrics by seeing them in familiar places. I find it easiest to understand the new metrics by seeing them on search results I'm familiar with; as an added bonus, this is one of the most helpful analyses you can do when looking at a new SERP for the first time." --Will Critchlow

2. Page Authority and Domain Authority

Page Authority and Domain Authority have taken their place as the primary metrics in the toolbar. These two predictive metrics will give you the best indication of how authoritative pages and domains are. If you miss having mozRank and mozTrust available at a glance, don't despair! You can add these back into the toolbar by selecting them from the settings menu.

3. Surf Like a Search Engine

We have added new settings that allow you to hide images, turn off JavaScript, and even set your user agent. This will help you see pages like the search engines do, and identify potential bad page behaviors. And just to help out, we’ve added a handy little overlay to keep you aware of when any of these features are set. Just click the link in the overlay and all of your settings will return to normal.

"The new user agent switching means I’ve removed another plug-in from Firefox. I love my SEO plugins but I also think there’s such a thing as having too many. Go for simplicity is what I always say. Special love goes out to disable JavaScript, too – I actually caught a nice bit of hidden link spam with this last week! Disable images is a sure fire way to check out the image alt attributes on a web page too. Nice." --Richard Baxter

"I don't want to take credit for an awesome feature. OK. I want to take credit for an awesome feature. After constantly forgetting I was surfing as googlebot and getting chucked out of Google calendar etc I asked for this feature and it's just as awesome as I hoped it would be. "

4. New Data in the Analyze Page Overlay

Our analyze page overlay has also been enhanced with a number of new, useful data points, including

Page Download Time – this becomes more important with Google’s announcement that speed matters.

Text to Code Ratio – Is there more code on your page than content? Don’t make the search engines sift through too much code to find the relevant content.

HTTP status codes – Find out the status code of the current page, and learn which redirects were involved in getting you there.

"The overlay is still the most valuable thing for me. I must use it 5+ times every day to get quick info about how many links are on a page, whether it's using rel="canonical" or whether the keywords are properly included in the right page elements. I hate using 'view source' and searching through code; overlay FTW!" --Rand Fishkin

"The http status codes feature is my favourite new addition to the tool. There's not more reloading and hunting through LiveHTTPHeaders reports - this lets me very easily see the redirect route taken in getting to the current page." --Rob Ousbey

5. Quick Access to Tools from SEOmoz and Third Parties

The tools dropdown has been expanded to include fast access to the latest SEOmoz tools as well as a wealth of other helpful resources, including traffic data, Twitter tools, and domain info.

I hope you enjoy the new toolbar. Please give it a try, and be sure to send feedback so we can keep making it better. You can easily send feedback by clicking on the light bulb icon on the toolbar.

About adamf —

Adam is the Chief Product Officer at Moz. In his spare time he tries to keep up with his young kids and teach them the merits of intelligent web design and agile methodologies.

I know Rand mentioned (can't remember if it was on the blog or in a webinar) you were looking at Google Chrome as an option for the toolbar. Any update on that? Thanks for the update, btw. This may actually get me to use Firefox again... at least until a Chrome version is released. ;)

Congrats on the big improvements to the Mozbar, because its based on Linkscape data the SERP overlay you shouldn't get the side affects like other seo tools of being blocked by Google for being a bot and scraping the top results.

So the question is now that the data is more visible does it mean that there are going to be more updates and geographic expansion of the Linkscape data?

To answer your question - we are continually working on improvements the Linkscape index, which should make results better overall, both in the U.S. and internationally. Also, an upcoming improvement will allow Linkscape to better handle non-English character sets, which should help improve international coverage as well.

I chatted with Nick a bit about this. We're investigating supporting site maps for some select domains and partners (particularly API partners). But in general we have to be careful of spammers in the same way that search engines have to.

Awesome! This is a great improvement. I liked the last version, but this has some really nice upgrades! Good job TEAMmoz.

Now that you have added the Yahoo! Links feature to the Tools, the one thing that I would find more useful is if there was an option that also took you to Yahoo site explorer and directly showed you all Inlinks "Except from this domain". It is one of my most used backlink tools for a quick assessment to better understand a sites link profile. This feature will probably work by adding a URL parameter that can be appended with "&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=u".

Love it, though I hope to see the "Tools" menu and the "Analyze Page" functionality available through the right-click menu as well :)Also, it would be great if it was made it possible to choose default tab to be shown when using "Analyze Page".

Unfortunately I can't justify spending the money on a PRO membership at the moment. When I started working where I do now, I was under the impression that I'd be working on some SEO strategy but I haven't at all yet really. Apart from the odd on-site suggestion (though I'm always undermined).

Hopefully a few years (months would be better, but it's unlikely) I'll be able to get a PRO membership when I start to do some more SEO.

I especially love the SERP display. One Liner, only the important information you need at a glance with the option of exploring more. I definitely look forward to the day when Linkscape will be updated more regularly and that way we'll definitely be able to ditch YSE once and for all...

Great work but i think you are missing some thing, Face Book and Delicious. I can see the twitter but it will be better if i have FB and Delicious or atleast FB. Facebook and twitter are competitors so i will be happy to see them at one place. Thankx adam for creating this

I installed the new version of the MozBar... great! but I have to point to a big BUT: I checked both on Google.es and Google.it and I've not seen any infos in their SERPs even if the option was on.

Maybe that is because Linkscape doesn't have all the inlinks panorama for spanish and italian sites, but I suppose that is something else, as no result had any DA and PA shown under. Is it that this function works only on the .com version of the Search Engines. If it so I claim an upgrade :).

Thanks for the heads up! We just shipped an update that will work with FF 4.0. You should get the update automatcially when FF notices it, or you can download it directly here: http://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar

Don't know if it is just me, but the subdomain thing isn't working, nothing comes up on any of the blogspot.com or wordpress.com subdomains when I try to check them. Also, switching it to subdomain causes the domain mozrank and domain moztrust to disappear when I switch it back to Root Domain. I have to go to show metrics and uncheck both, then recheck each again to make them reappear.

Something that's happening in my FF browser. I have all six numbers turned on (Page authority, rank, trust and Domain authority, rank, trust) and if i'm logged out the length of the item on the new Moz toolbar causes my scrollbar to disappear. The number of items is too many and runs over and confuses the browser causing the scrollbar to disappear. If logged in, it's fine.

1) We are counting the time from when the request is started to when FF reports the request is completed (state_stop) event. This generally relates to when the DOM is ready.

2) We are not sending info back or specifically tracking the pages that users are visiting when surfing with the mozBar installed. We are only keeping aggregate info about installations and traffic from the mozBar back to the SEOmoz site.

Joining the party a little late here, but congrats Adam, I know how hard you've worked on this! I've been using the new Mozbar for actual client work for a little while and I really, really like what it does.

congrats on the new mozbar. i particularly lovthe SERP display. To me this is one of the best improvment of the new toolbar because i can compare a lot of competitives website with just a click! amazing

Thank you. That worked. You're the only person at SEOmoz that was able to fix that since you originally launched the bar. Now if I could just log in with Safari and Chrome I'd have no more complaints :)

Just a quick thought that it would be great if we can see what the text to code ratio should actually be compared to our site metrics. Kind of making all the metrics actionable in terms of if its good or not because it can force users to act on it. Adding color coding (green / red) should also make it more usable.

I really liked the idea of having a bar showing progress for key metrics like domain and page authority because it forces me to act.

Great work! I use the SEOmoz toolbar on a daily basis and these improvements will make a big difference in my day-to-day SEO work. I've played around with some of the new changes and can already see the tremendous value they will provide me. Thanks so much for all your continued work at making a good thing even better!

Is there a guide somewhere on the Toolbar? Like what each metric means? IE PA, DA I know those mean Domain Authority, Page Authority but there are so many little metrics it's tough to keep track of sometimes.